Surfing

Right now is one of those times when I really dislike my thesis. It's 10:00pm on a Friday night, and I am alternating between editing perl scripts and watching surfing videos on hulu.com. The surfers don't sound very intellegent. They say stuff like "when your turn comes, then it's your turn." Oh, really.

But when I stop and think about it, what do those surfers need with a big vocabulary? They have everything they need. They wake up in the morning and paddle out. If you have ever laid your head on the chest of the person you love and felt their heart beating, that is what it feels like to paddle out on a surfboard. (Although sometimes, if you surf in WA, the ocean has had a lot of coffee.) When you are out there, you don't need to know that the rate at which your body temperature approaches the ambient temperature of the ocean could be modeled as an exponential function. (You know, because it's proportional to the difference between the two temperatures.) You don't need to know about anything except your immediate surroundings and what you are going to do next.

Those kids who grow up surfing are so lucky! They never know the horrors of unix, or vi, or finding that missing paren at 10:30 on a Friday night. Their lives are so happy and magical that they barely even have to learn how to talk. I never thought about this until now, but I think the only reasons humans developed the ability to talk is because we were dissatisfied. Hmmm. No wonder dolphins can't talk.